Cops and Jobbers

By Jos

LAW AND ORDER

by DOROTHY UHNAK 512 pages. Simon & Schuster. $8.95.

THE SUPER COPS by LH. WHITTEMORE 359 pages. Stein & Day. $7.95.

SERPICO

by PETER MAAS 314 pages. Viking. $7.95.

The era of the pig has ended. It is the year of the cop. On TV, at the movies and especially in books, the men in blue are being returned to their once traditional position--just above firemen and below returning war heroes.

There are nearly as many copies of cop books coming off the presses now as there once were junior G-man badges. The first two of the year, Law and Order and The Super Cops, have already muscled onto the bestseller lists.

Serpico, the latest entry; will probably do as well. There are more to come, including a new book in September by Joseph Wambaugh, the Los Angeles police sergeant who started the current cop craze with his novels The New Centurions and The Blue Knight. Like all good young trends, the police book has moved east from the West Coast. All three of the newest books involve the New York City police department.

Dorothy Uhnak's Law and Order is a novel that uses three generations of Irish cops to explore the way the department actually works. The plot is a tangle of corruption, sex scandals, blackmail and professional and family loyalties. The Super Cops are Dave Greenberg and Bob Hantz, two real police heroes who patrolled a black Brooklyn ghetto with such derring-do that drug pushers and grateful residents dubbed them Batman and Robin. Also nonfiction, Serpico is about Frank Serpico, the patrolman whose charges of widespread corruption in the New York police department were eventually documented by the Knapp Commission.

The books are basically alike, particularly in their insistence that they portray the way things really are. In truth, they are more of a badge cadge. Michael Korda, Simon & Schuster's editor in chief, has said of the new cop books, "The prime element is that they suggest a simpler world." Exactly so. To keep it that way, the authors rigorously suppress untidy complexity. Mrs. Uhnak's novel ends in a hasty melodramatic knitting of loose strands. Maas' reportage resolutely refuses to go beyond Serpico's own viewpoint. Whittemore is worst of all, portraying his heroes without a fleck of imperfection. They burst into pushers' apartments but somehow never violate any constitutional rights. They slay two big-time drug suppliers, but the regrettable bloodletting really happens because other cops fail to back them up properly. They manage to get convictions on more than 90% of the 600 suspects they arrest, with no explanation of why the judicial system functions so well for them.

The lack of ambiguities in these books renders all the central characters as inhabitants of adult comic strips. Although they write exciting narratives, the authors do not really seem to care as much about cops as they do about the marketplace. As for the police, they surely deserve reclamation from the '60s' images of them as hired goons of the Establishment. Unfortunately, the new cop books popularize the equally simple-minded view that all would be well if only bureaucrats and legal purists would leave the police alone.

Jose M. Ferrer III

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